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MiriamSchapiro

Miriam (Mimi) Schapiro is one of the foremost pioneers in the feminist art movement in the United States. Nicknamed “Mimi Appleseed” after Johnny Appleseed whose dream was for a land where blossoming apple trees were everywhere (two hundred years later, some of those trees still bear apples), she has opened paths previously closed and unknown to women artists, past and present, trained and untrained. Since 1970, Schapiro has raised women’s consciousness through her writing, painting, printmaking, teaching and sculpture. She has lectured extensively on feminist issues to professional conferences, university audiences, art classes and women’s groups. Through the use of large scale media and symbols emblematic of the female, she has battled to pay homage to women and their undervalued domestic traditions. Her seminal role in the art world was acknowledged with the esteemed honor of 2002 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement of the College Art Association, the national organization of artists and art historians.

Institution: Miami University Art Museum, Oxford, Ohio. Purchased with the generous support of the Kent State University Research Council

Among her many awards are: Ford Foundation Grant; National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship; Guggenheim Fellowship; Skowhegan Medal for Collage (for her development of femmage); and Rockefeller Foundation Grant for Artists Residency at the Bellagio Study and Conference Center in Italy. Schapiro has also been honored by the National Women’s Caucus for Art and the National Association of Schools of Art and Design. She is the recipient of six honorary degrees. She has exhibited extensively in both individual and group shows, some of which have been of women-only groups. She is a founding member of the Feminist Art Institute in New York, co-founder of the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art and co-founder of the feminist journal Heresies.

Schapiro was born in Toronto, Canada, on November 15, 1923, the only child of Russian Jewish parents, Fannie Cohen (1899–1998) and Theodore Schapiro (1898–1999). Both sets of grandparents emigrated from Russia. Her maternal grandfather invented the first movable doll’s eye in the United States and manufactured “Teddy Bears” (named after Theodore Roosevelt). Her paternal grandfather was both a rabbi in an East New York synagogue and a tailor who sewed the arctic clothes for Admiral Peary and his group of explorers. Both men were amateur scholars. Miriam’s maternal grandmother had eight children while her paternal grandmother had six. Both grandmothers were working women, aiding their husbands and rearing their children. Schapiro’s father, an artist and intellectual, was studying at the Beaux Arts in New York City at the time of Miriam’s birth. Later he earned his living as an industrial designer. In 1926 he ran for Congress on the Socialist Party ticket. Later he was the director of the Rand School of Social Science in New York City. Her homemaker mother, an ardent Zionist, was highly supportive of Miriam’s wish to be a professional artist. Miriam began sketching at the age of six.

While at Erasmus Hall High School in Brooklyn from 1937 to 1941, Schapiro, who describes herself as a “cultural Jew,” attended Saturday classes at the Museum of Modern Art and Federal Art Project classes in the evenings to study drawing from the nude. Her higher education was at State University of Iowa, Iowa City ( B.A. 1945, M.A. 1947, M.F.A. 1949). In 1946 Schapiro met Paul Brach (b. 1924), a fellow student, and they married that year. She notes that Brach furthered her Jewish identity; he was among the American soldiers who helped to liberate Theresienstadt in World War II. His recounting of his experience affected her deeply. Their son, Peter, was born in 1955.

In 1950–1952, while Brach was on the faculty at the University of Missouri, Mimi worked as a secretary for a rabbi and as a children’s art teacher in Columbia, Missouri. From 1952 to 1955 she functioned as a children’s art teacher, real estate secretary, and bookshop assistant in New York. Since 1955 she has been a full-time artist. Schapiro exhibited as an Abstract Expressionist in the 1950s in New York City. An acknowledged member of the “second generation” of this predominant movement of the 1950s, she was a figurative painter whose work was characterized by subtle colors and painterly, gestural strokes. Women appeared in her paintings during these early years of her career, whether they were appropriations of famous art historical masterpieces or incorporated photographs of celebrities such as Judy Garland or Gloria Swanson. In 1967 the couple moved to California where, as acting professor in the art department of the University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, she was among the first artists to recognize the potential of the computer. She produced series of computer hard-edged, geometrical paintings and drawings in collaboration with David Nalibof, a physicist. Collaboration with others has characterized much of Schapiro’s art.

In California Schapiro participated in women’s consciousness-raising groups. In the late 1960s her involvement in the budding feminist movement was manifested in her computer-generated painting OX (1967). Painted in pinks and orange with mechanical precision, OX became one of the signature works of the early feminist art movement because of its vaginal reference. Subsequently, the term “central core imagery” was designated by the feminist artist Judy Chicago and Schapiro after discovering the recurrence of the image in a number of works by other women artists.

In the 1970s, after years of personal and professional experiences as a female in a patriarchal art world, Miriam became profoundly committed to the cause of feminist art. In 1971, together with Chicago, she founded and led the nation’s first feminist art program at The California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. Chicago and Schapiro team-taught classes for women artists and co-directed Womanhouse (1972), a Feminist Art Program students’ collaborative. In this much-publicized environment, an old seventeen-room Hollywood house scheduled for demolition was transformed into rooms whose decoration and furnishing reflected various feminist concerns. In collaboration with Sherry Brody, Schapiro contributed The Dollhouse (1972) to the program. With its six separate miniature rooms, some filled with fantasy elements, TheDollhouse is one of the best known icons of feminist art. In this assemblage, with its stage-like settings of toy furniture, wood, fabric, paint and paper, the only male included is a stuffed fabric nude model for the artist’s studio. This room is the most politically significant in the carefully crafted work. The use of fabric, which became a major material in the evolution of her mature career, is a symbol to celebrate the anonymous women who worked in their homes doing quilting, cooking, child-raising and interior decorating. A merger of irony and artistic skill, this installation ultimately questions female connections and limitations.

Schapiro regards her work as a personal and political struggle to publicize and strengthen the achievements of anonymous women of the past and their traditional art forms. Her feminist polemic concerns the plight of all women, whether from third-world nations, ancient cultures or our modern era. For example, in her writing she refers to Native American women who embroidered quillwork on their buckskin bags. She selects, buys and collects items associated with homemaking such as lace, brocade, silks, sequins, wool, quilts, needlework, rick rack, handkerchiefs, beads, swatches of taffeta, valentines, wall paper and fabric pieces and incorporates them in her work. New artworks are sometimes started by items such as tea towels, doilies, valentines or ribbons that women give her at various lectures around the nation. Her political aim is to put an end to the alleged insignificance of these female symbols and prevent further trivialization of the overlooked traditions they recall.

Her development of “femmage,” a conflation of textile arts and painting in which the twentieth-century collage, pioneered by Picasso in 1912, is transformed into an idiom of female empowerment, is designed to boldly confront sexist thought and dignify women. In the 1970s she recast collage, which she defined as “pictures assembled from assorted materials,” into works which through combined painting and pasted items commemorate hidden, marginalized elements of female domestic culture as practiced for centuries. Materials relating to needlework, appliquéing, brocading, clothes making and home decorating are used for their historical value in terms of women’s artistic heritage. Sometimes using paper, but primarily large canvases with highly saturated colors of acrylic paint, Schapiro layered patterned fabric swatches into feminist collages. She often selected fabrics with floral designs to further accentuate women’s traditional art forms. The use of monumental scale and patterned or decorative fabric pieces merged in the “femmage” was a strong response to a patriarchal history of art.

To use her own term, Schapiro has a “lexicon of imagery” for subjects that further her mission. Prominent motifs such as the house, the fan and the heart appear frequently in her oeuvre as single themes or in a combination of themes. In her “femmages” she has fought the age-old prejudice against craft, usually associated with women and domestic life, with her swatches of fabric collaged onto canvas to form teapots and cups, sentimental stitched handkerchiefs, hearts and flowers, aprons or houses.

The absence of women artists in basic college art history textbooks propelled Schapiro to make a change. As a member of the board of the College Art Association she argued for greater recognition of women artists. Her series of “collaborations” with female role models in the history of art are ways to bring about awareness of ancestry. With her mixed-media approach she assembles a reproduction of a painting by a woman painter such as Mary Cassatt (1844–1926)and surrounds it with a collage of ribbons and fabrics. Other artists honored in this series are Frida Kahlo (1907–1954), Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun (French Neoclassical painter, 1755–1842), Berthe Morisot (French impressionist painter, 1841–1895), and Sonia Delauney.

Schapiro was one of the leaders of Pattern and Decoration (also labeled Pattern Painting), a major movement of the mid- to late 1970s which offered an alternative to the rigidity and persistence of the Minimalist and Conceptual movements of the 1960s. A major advocate of large-scale decoration, she had frequently incorporated colorful ribbons and fabrics into her canvases, often over a geometric pattern, thus creating a feminine aesthetic. While both male and female P & D artists were inspired by the dimensions and bold look of her work and began to use ornamental grids and patterns in brilliant colors on their canvases, they did not all share her concern with validation of women’s motifs and traditions, which was a bold step in a century overwhelmingly dominated by abstract painting.

Since the mid-1980s she has returned to figurative work, using fabric and more dynamic brushwork and motifs. Inspired by theater and dance, her large canvases display the creative woman in action on stage. In I’m Dancing as Fast as ICan (1984), Schapiro symbolically presents herself as a dancer surrounded by her parents. The dancer motif recalled the creative female as well as her own childhood dance lessons. The circles surrounding the central figure are a quotation from Sonia Delauney. Without Delauney’s typical combination of acrylic paint and fabric on canvas, Schapiro in 1987 characterized Marlene Dietrich in her famous role as chanteuse in Der Blaue Engel. In the late 1980s and 1990s she created numerous “collaborations” with Frida Kahlo or early twentieth-century women artists such as Natalia Goncharova (Russian cubist painter, 1881–1962), Liubov Popova (Russian constructivist painter, 1889–1924), Varvara Stepanova (Russian painter and designer, 1894–1958), Alexandra Exter (Russian painter and designer, 1882–1949), Delauney and others. These works, both on paper and on canvas, pay tribute to her Russian artistic female ancestors. Conservatory (1988) is one of a number of tributes to Frida Kahlo, who is placed in an imaginary setting among the decorative background materials, together with Tlazolteotl, an important and complex earth-mother goddess from the Aztec pantheon. Schapiro’s use of brilliant color, jewelry, and patterned costume are signature marks of Kahlo.

Schapiro explored her Jewish identity in a number of works which appeared around the mid-1980s: Golem, a series on Frida Kahlo, Sonia Delauney and Four Matriarchs, four stained glass windows portraying biblical women such as Rachel and Leah, at Temple Sholom, Chicago. Two more recent works—My History and Lost and Found—use the house-shaped canvas she developed in the past. On the roofs of both canvases is a menorah and within the houses is a grid of windows each displaying Jewish elements. In My History there are a hallah cover, photos of Anne Frank, Frida Kahlo and the young Chagall in an art class, and the Star of David Jews were required to wear under the Nazis. In Lost and Found more of Schapiro’s Jewish iconography is presented: a photograph of concentration camp survivors, a Hebrew illuminated manuscript page, a Jew at the Western Wall, a pouch for phylacteries, and other significant emblems.

Schapiro’s work is included in numerous collections in the United States, Germany, Israel and Australia. As a leading figure in the feminist art movement, she has encouraged and challenged the aspirations of countless women artists for a bright future. Her impact is seen in the feminist art history courses taught throughout colleges and universities and in the number of women artists now represented in many art history texts.

Bibliography

Books

Broude, Norma, and Mary Garrard. The
Power of Feminist Art: The American Movement of the 1970s, History and Impact.
New York: 1994.

This is one of the definitive studies of the first decade of feminist art.
Numerous contributors, including Schapiro. Article with accompanying photographs
of Womanhouse.
Networks and organizations of feminist politics are discussed. Chapters on
collaborations, Pattern and Decoration movement. Extensive selected bibliography
and highly selective chronology with illustrations.

Gouma-Peterson, Thalia. Miriam
Schapiro: Shaping the Fragments of Art and Life. New York: 1999.

A thorough monograph of Schapiro’s personal and artistic growth. Detailed
interpretations of many of the works of art accompanied by many beautiful
illustrations. This is by far the finest source for a real grasp of her political
mission and her aesthetic thought.

Exhibition Catalogues

“Miriam Schapiro: Works on Paper—A Thirty-Year Retrospective,” curated and
organized by Robert A. Yassin, Director, Tuscon Museum of Art, 1999.

Catalogue contains wonderful article by Paul Brach, Schapiro’s husband, and
a foreword by Gloria Steinem. Illustrations provide a chronology of her developing
imagery. Fifty-four color plates that help one understand her recurrent designs
and themes.

Journal Articles

Broude, Norma. “Miriam Schapiro and ‘Femmage’”: Reflections on the conflict
between Decoration and Abstraction in Twentieth-Century Art.” Arts
Magazine, February 1980: 83–87.

An instructive coverage of the conflict between the hierarchy in the fine
arts. Abstraction has always dominated and has been identified with the macho
artist. Decoration has held a lower rank, although Matisse and Kandinsky are
brought in as examples. Schapiro’s Mary
Cassatt and Me is compared to Duchamp’s famous appropriation of Mona
Lisa. The article helps provide understanding of Schapiro’s accomplishments.

In 1996 I went to a workshop taught by Miriam Schapiro at Moore College of Art and Design with several fellow artists. We were members of the artist cooperative, ArtForms Gallery Manayunk. I was a founder and the director. Truth be told, I had no idea who Schapiro was but came along for the ride. That was the beginning of what was to become an unforgettable relationship between one of the greatest women artists of our time, a pioneer in the history of women in art, and me.

Visit to ArtForms Gallery Manayunk

Several days into the class, Miriam asked if she could see ArtForms Gallery so I drove her to Manayunk. She was very impressed with the huge open space and the exhibition. She wanted me to tell her all about how we operated the gallery and expressed an interest in meeting the artist members, mostly women. After her workshop ended we kept in touch by phone, mail and later by email.

She wrote, “I often think about our class together at Moore College. It was filled with wonderful women.”

Asking Mimi to exhibit

After meeting Miriam and studying about her I began to think it would be wonderful to feature her work at our gallery. I wondered if I dared ask her to exhibit at an artist-run cooperative. I was nervous about asking as I found her directness a little intimidating. At that time, she was represented by the renowned Steinbaum Krauss Gallery in New York so I was worried that such a famous artist would not be willing to show her work in a small artist run cooperative gallery in Philadelphia.

With some apprehension, I called Miriam and asked her point blank if she would consider exhibiting at ArtForms and was stunned by her quick “yes”. When I suggested she show her work in a solo exhibition, using the whole gallery, she literally snapped at me, “I won’t exhibit if it’s not with the rest of the women.”

Steinbaum Krauss Gallery Owner

My next hurdle was to approach Bernice Steinbaum, the doyenne/owner of the Steinbaum-Krauss Gallery who represented Mimi. Soon after we agreed on the prerequisites; arrangements were made; art insurance was secured and donations to cover expenses were acquired. About two months later, a large art transport van arrived in front of ArtForms with 18 historic paintings including Anonymous Was A Woman and many of the famous Schapiro fan works. Seeing them arrive at our gallery was breathtaking. We could not believe this was happening.

The Exhibition

ArtForms members displayed their work along side Miriam’s, many created especially for the exhibition in her honor. The night of the reception hundreds of people came to see the great Miriam Schapiro. She sat on a high stool and received hundreds of adoring fans. Many were well known figures in the arts. At one point I turned to her and said, “You’re a rock star.” She beamed. People lined up with the invitation, catalogs and articles for her to autograph. What a testimony to her outstanding contribution to the history of art and women in art!

The women of ArtForms Gallery with Miriam Schapiro. I am 3rd to the left of Mimi.

Reviews

Robin Rice, Art Writer of the Philadelphia City Paper said in the January 9, 1996 issue,

“Miriam Schapiro, pioneer of Pattern and Decoration and matriarch of the feminist art movement, is putting Manayunk's ArtForms Gallery on the national art map. The internationally recognized artist was invited to mount a solo show but, in the generous spirit of feminism, Schapiro said she preferred to share the exhibition with ArtForms' 28 members. Even so, this is no token gesture: some of the…paintings and collages Schapiro is showing are major works of heroic proportions.”

Heroic they were and after the ArtForms exhibition, all were transported to the Smithsonian Institute for a monumental exhibition of Miriam’s work.

Philadelphia art writer, Edward J. Sozanski wrote about Miriam Schapiro and Us in January 1997,

“Schapiro’s paintings are exuberant celebrations of vivid, emotive color and decorative vitality, generated by fabric inserts deftly integrated into painted passages. Collectively, they assert a feminine spirit so forcefully that one is hard-pressed to resist it.”

He described the exhibition at ArtForms as “a gesture of homage combined with one of friendship.” Sozanski captured how Miriam, the “founding mother of feminist art… a leader in the pattern and decoration movement of the 1970’s” felt toward the artists at ArtForms.

“I can’t tell you how happy I am about what has happened for me this year. Beginning with the show at ArtForms (thanks for bringing me good luck) and continuing until this moment, my phone has been ringing off the hook.”

Walking On Eggs

My own art for the exhibition was called “Walking On Eggs Or My Life As A Woman,” a mixed-media homage to Miriam where I collaged photos of her, her art and my own as well as my photographic history. Mimi was very complimentary about it. My artist statement read,

“I spent my adult years searching for an identity. I attributed to men more skills and power than I thought I had…If only I had known about her when I first started…”

Sisterhood

She was thrilled with the whole experience and later wrote, “ Your exhibition Joan, the huge amount of work you put in preparing, putting me up for the opening and taking such good care of me is all part of a special memory.”She continued:

“All of our experience together fits into a political picture which began in the 70’s and which has been underground for a decade and a half. Sisterhood is an exchange. Sisters who give to each other, receive from each other. What they give and receive is support, encouragement, hope and wisdom. I would say our exchange was mutual and layered with a loving appreciation.

In 1997 you have given your gallery another dimension which is not seen in other cooperative galleries and I daresay ART FORMS [sic]will be credited (my job*) for its first revival of one of the original 70’s feminist artists…

Yet the unbelievable attendance at your opening, the fever that was aroused, was indicative of how women feel about honoring themselves and their own. For me, the opening told me that Sisterhood lives.

But it couldn’t live without a leader or leaders. Give yourself a good pat on the back Joan. You made a mitzvah for yourself and for the gallery, but more than either- for all women who know what you accomplished. As for me, you gave me hope again. Underneath the cosmetic exterior of our culture like the Calvin Klein ads and Donna Karen’s slip-like dresses, there is an idealism resting – waiting – for women to wake up and realize that although it may appear as though we have grown up and taken our place in the world of men like academia and middle management – we are still the second sex and have a long way to go before we are accepted as the equal of men.”

She always told me how impressed she was with the group of women who founded and ran such a successful gallery. Despite the 2 male members at the time, with 27 women members, perhaps for her we were the ultimate “Womanhouse.” She wrote in one letter, “Educating men never stops for women and all of us have known burnout at different times in our lives.”A year after her exhibition at ArtForms, Mimi sent a Hanukkah card with:

“Just a simple thank you for all your efforts- I feel honored just to have my work supported by such a wonderful woman…”

Invitation to exhibit at Steinbaum Krauss

In 1997 Bernice Steinbaum invited me and several other artists who had worked closely with Miriam in the Philadelphia exhibition to participate in her gallery summer group exhibition, titled Hung Out to Dry. I assume she and Miriam thought it was a way of thanking us. My artist friends and I went to New York to a reception at the gallery and were quite thrilled with this special opportunity. Miriam and Paul were both there.

Bernice and me at her gallery in NYC.

Love Mimi

Miriam took an interest in my art and was very encouraging expressing approval when I told her about my exhibitions and what I was doing. We spoke many times on the phone and she often wrote, signing her letters “love Mimi or Miriam.” One winter when she was alone in the Hamptons while Paul was out of town and she was preparing for a solo exhibition I remember we spoke many times.

Solo Exhibition in Philadelphia

In 1999 I had a solo exhibition at ArtForms Gallery and invited Miriam to lead a seminar at the gallery during the exhibition. She came to Philadelphia for the reception and workshop.

Me(2nd from left) and the women of ArtForms Gallery Manayunk.

During her visit I gave her a necklace that had belonged to my mother as shown in the photographs. She loved it and was openly very moved that I would honor her with my mother’s jewelry. She said I was the daughter she never had.

“Well everyone loves my new jewelry. It was so good of you to pass it on to me. What a dear thing to do.”

In May 1999 she wrote:

It was a good experience for me to see your show. You are a passionate artist with a singular way of expressing yourself.

I enjoyed Friday – we did so much – the Museum gave us something to think about and so did the lunch we had there as well. (We visited the Philadelphia Museum of Art together) Our shopping and dinner meant a lot to me because it was my day to do ordinary things which became special because I was with bright, articulate women. You… were exceptionally giving and I savored it all. …when you presented me with beautiful gifts (my mother’s necklace) I don’t feel I deserve, I was overwhelmed. I just hope I didn’t disappoint you on Saturday. (that day she conducted a wonderful, very well attended seminar at ArtForms.)

All my love to you and to David who I only know from your loving description. I wish only the best. (He was quite ill)

Susanne Okamoto, Miriam and me at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Mahatma

At one point I did a caricature portrait with caran d’ache and acrylics from a photo of her wearing my mother’s necklace and sent it to her. She thanked me but was clearly annoyed that I “gave” her wrinkles. I found such vanity surprising from a feminist who decried the emphasis placed on appearance. When she questioned the shape I drew in the middle of her forehead I explained it was the symbol she used on her stationary and that it was on her forehead because she was The Mahatma of the Women’s Movement. She burst out laughing.

Over the next several years she sent cards, books and letters for Chanukah and other holidays always with invitations to come visit her and Paul in the Hamptons. She also sent commentaries on art she saw in New York city.

“Paul loved the painting by T. Eakins(1900) called “The Thinker”. I loved a painting by Gerald Murphy (1924-5) called “Watch”.Also other works which define America-from 1900-1950 bring back so many experiences I had even as a child growing up in a cultured home.”

Mimi On My Mind

The years passed and in 2011 while doing research about the great feminist Jewish artists for Jewish Art History seminars given by the senior rabbi of Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel, Lance J. Sussman, Ph.D. historian I spent a lot of time telling Rabbi Sussman about this quintessential Jewish feminist artist, my friend, Miriam Schapiro.

I wanted her to know she was on my mind and that I had included her in the rabbi’s documentary, that I had showed him her prints hanging in my home, one she sent as a gift ( she references the print, ‘Lost and Found’ in her letter of June 12, 1999 telling me she had not yet sent it because she did not have an assistant) and one I purchased at the Steinbaum Krause Gallery.

A Letter to Mimi

I decided to send a letter to let her know I was thinking about her. About two weeks later I received a call from a woman who identified herself as Miriam’s caregiver. Sadly, she told me she read my letter to Miriam and was so touched by it she felt she needed inform me that Miriam has dementia and that I would never hear from my friend again. That considerate call broke my heart.

Final Thoughts

I have never stopped thinking about Mimi Schapiro and how she impacted my life. She was an inspiration on two levels, as a powerful spokes-woman for women in art and as a brilliant, inspirational artist. She was very supportive of my art. She was direct and not one to mince words so her compliments were very encouraging.

Looking at my own work I often see hints of Miriam’s style and point of view. I certainly use decoration, montage, patterning and brilliant colors in my own work expressed through the lens of an outspoken feminist artist, me. To know she’s there but not really is quite devastating and fills me with regrets about missed opportunities.

I’m reading Lady Painter, the biography of Joan Mitchell by Patricia Albers with frequent references to Mitchell’s friendship with Mimi and Paul and visits to the Hamptons. In 1957 she and the Brachs rented a cottage there. I’m so sorry I never took Mimi up on her offers to come for a visit. I can only imagine how rich that would have been. As Gloria Steinem wrote about her, “by bringing art into our lives – and our lives into art – she has transformed both.”

The photos used are unsigned and might have been taken by me or photographer member Caryn Kauffman or Marilyn Simon, sculptor so I want to acknowledge that possibility. We always documented events at ArtForms Gallery in photos.